Mr. FLETCHER. Has he made any statement to this effect? Mr. MCGRADY. I can not state about that, or about his making any personal statement.

Mr. FLETCHER. You are making a personal statement here, are you not?

Mr. MCGRADY. I am representing the American Federation of Labor. I am the legislative representative of the American Federation of Labor here in Washington.

Mr. FLETCHER. And they universally indorse your point of view? Mr. MCGRADY. The convention has taken that action.

Mr. FLETCHER. And does that represent the entire membership? Mr. MCGRADY. Yes, sir; the entire membership.

Mr. DOUGLASS. Maryland would have been represented in that convention?

Mr. MCGRADY. Yes, sir.

Mr. CONNOLLY. I wish now to introduce Mr. Charles A. McMahon, representing the National Catholic Welfare Conference.

STATEMENT OF CHARLES A. McMAHON, REPRESENTING THE NATIONAL CATHOLIC WELFARE CONFERENCE

Mr. MCMAHON. I represent the National Catholic Welfare Conference, which has existed officially since 1919, and was formed to coordinate and unify Catholic action in this country in matters of education, social welfare, Americanization, and similar activities. It is the successor of the National Catholic War Council, which was one of the seven recognized agencies that officially cooperated with the Government during the war. My position with the Conference is that of editor of its official publication, the N. C. W. C. Bulletin, Also for the past seven years, or more, I have been associated as director of its civic education campaign, which is a nation-wide movement for better citizenship, and I have been during the same period director of its motion-picture bureau.

In view of the fact that your committee desires to conclude this hearing today, I shall try to be as brief as possible.

At this point, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I desire to introduce a brief statement directed particularly against the bill, H. R. 6333, popularly known as the Upshaw bill. I submit this statement in behalf of Rev. John J. Burke, general secretary of the National Catholic Welfare Conference. It is a rather brief statement, and I would like to read it.

A memorandum opposing the Upshaw bill, providing a Federal motion picture commission. Filed with the Educational Committee of the House of Representatives in behalf of the Rev. John J. Burke, C. S. P., general secretary National Catholic Welfare Conference, by Charles A. McMahon, director National Catholic Welfare Conference Motion-Picture Bureau.

The National Catholic Welfare Conference is opposed to the creation of any Federal board with such sweeping and arbitrary powers as provided for by the bill under consideration.

The bill is unnecessary, since every one of the governments of our 48 States and the municipalities thereof possess at the present time ample powers and laws to protect and safeguard public morals. A Federal bureau empowered to override such powers is, therefore, unwarranted. Its creation would be inimical to the American sense of liberty and local self-government.

The passage of this present Upshaw bill would mean the ceding to a Federal commission, on the part of the American people, of their rights and

privileges so far as the selection of their entertainment by motion pictures is concerned. It would act and would be cited as a precedent for similar procedure with regard to the press, the stage, and, indeed, all similar institutions of our national life.

The present Upshaw bill creates a Federal commission and invests it with the power to decide by the arbitrary opinion of its seven members what shall or what shall not be exhibited to the American people. The present Upshaw bill gives the same commission the further arbitrary power to decide what films are exportable and what are not. It empowers seven individuals to pronounce judgment on the screen entertainment of 117,000,000 people of our own land and of millions more in countries to which American-made films might be exported. Such an unlimited grant of arbitrary power was never yet conceded to any agency of popular government.

We object to the bill for the further reason that it removes control of the motion-picture industry from the Federal Trade Commission and puts that control into the hands of the Federal motion-picture commission. One may well ask himself are the seven members of the commission to be experts in industrial control or in moral censorship, or in both. Why exempt the motionpicture industry from the control of the Federal Trade Commission? Why multiply Federal bureaus and commissions? No reason can be offered to show that a new and separate commission will control the motion-picture industry better than the present Federal Trade Commission. It is certainly inadvisable to confound and confuse industrial regulation and moral censorship.

With regard to the second function of this commission-namely. that of censorship we are unalterably opposed to the un-American procedure by which the present bill proposes to apply it. When the right of selection and the power of discrimination are put in the hands of the board of censorship, as is provided in the instructing clauses of the Upshaw bill, one hesitates to think to what unwarranted limits these censorship powers might be carried, to predict what blunders of private judgment may be perpetrated, and to what a regrettable extent personal prejudice may be carried; worse still, how our own Government will encourage the surrender of that personal moral responsibility on which the Government itself depends for its own life and vigor. The National Catholic Welfare Conference most earnestly desires clean pictures and has worked effectively through its thousands of affiliated organizations and societies of Catholic men and women to elevate the standard of motion-picture production and exhibition. At the same time, it has striven, in season and out, to elevate public taste for wholesome entertainment and thereby make it profitable for the industry to produce good pictures.

We object also to the provision in the bill which gives to the commission the right to say whether or not a particular film is exportable to other coun tries. No such blanket authority should be granted.

That provision of the bill by which an amount equal to $1,000,000, from, the license fees collected by the Secretary of the Treasury, would be set aside for the use of the Bureau of Education in the manufacture of educational films, seems to us not only an amazing but also a most ill-advised method of taxation.

We might continue to point out other provisions of the bill that show how loosely and unwisely it has been drawn, but we feel the evidence we have submitted is amply sufficient to warrant its rejection. Respectfully submitted.

JOHN J. BURKE, C. S. P.,
General Secretary.

I may say that while that memorandum was drafted specifically against H. R. 6233, we are equally opposed to the Swoope bill, and I here register our objections to it and urge your committee to reject it as well as the bill to which Father Burke's statement makes ref

erence.

During the rest of my time, which I hope will not exceed 4 or 5 minutes

Mrs. KAHN (interposing). Pardon me. You may have all the time you desire. I think the committee feels that you are entitled to all the time you wish. Am I right, Mr. Chairman?

The CHAIRMAN. Absolutely.

Mr. MCMAHON. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

I desire to take up very informally some of the statements made by proponents of the measure, and to answer some of the questions raised by some of the members of the committee.

The question has been asked-and I think that Congresswoman Kahn of California has persistently asked it-"Are the movies getting better or getting worse?" The statement was made by a representative of the Maryland Citizens' League for Better Motion Pictures, that in her judgment, while artistically and technically improving, from the viewpoint of morals they were getting worse. Other similar statements were, I believe, made before your committee. The Baltimore lady indicated, I think, that she could count on the fingers of both hands all the worth-while pictures which have been produced. I did not understand that she specified any particular or given time.

For the information of your members, if you would care to look them over, I submit to you, Mr. Chairman, our official publication, which maintains a motion picture department. Those are the last three issues of our magazine. You will find enumerated therein perhaps more than 100 pictures so far circulated this year, which our bureau has seen fit, because of their worthy features, to call to the attention of our Catholic people.

The CHAIRMAN. Pardon me, Mr. McMahon. You have submitted these. Do you care to have them, or any part of them, in the record?

Mr. MCMAHON. I do not care to have them in the record unless you see fit to put them in. I would like to have the members of the committee just casually look over the list, because I think it has a bearing upon the statements that have been made to the effect that pictures are getting worse. Here are more than 100 that have been circulated this year which, in our judgment, have been deemed worth while to recommend to our people for their patronage. I do not say that they are all 100 per cent perfect, but as a whole, they represent a very good type of motion picture entertainment.

One of the functions of our bureau is the conduct of a nation-wide review service which we distribute through the N. C. W. C. News Service, a service similar to the Associated Press. This serves nearly 80 Catholic weeklies and dailies in this country and some abroad. We furnish through our bureau a list of pictures and review them for this N. C. W. C. News Service. Last year, I think, in all, we recommended perhaps between 200 and 250 pictures of 1925 product which we felt constituted worth-while motion-picture entertainment. When you figure that up, 200 pictures would furnish entertainment for at least four nights each week during the year and I do not know that any person needs or desires to see the movies more than that number of times. Surely there is sufficient worthy product to furnish at least the minimum of four satisfactory motion-picture exhibitions per week.

Mr. FENN. Were these 250 pictures that you speak of exhibited in Baltimore?

Mr. MCMAHON. I assume that most of them have been. Certainly all of them have been exhibited in the District of Columbia.

Mr. FENN. Your organization had an opportunity of viewing them before the programs were released?

Mr. MCMAHON. Yes, sir.

Mr. FENN. I do not mean that you went to the theaters and approved them in that way.

Mr. MCMAHON. Now, gentlemen and Madam Congresswoman, I wish to say that these pictures are not 100 per cent perfect, but they are almost lily white in comparison with the product of the legitimate stage, the product of the present-day fiction and the kind of stories that we see in magazine form on our news stands.

Mrs. KAHN. But these have had the personal approval of somebody that has seen them?

Mr. MCMAHON. Yes; and we do not sit just casually and view these pictures. We view them critically and we view them not as to whether they please us specifically or not, because we are thinking in terms of the average Catholic movie-goer when he sees a picture. I suppose motion pictures constitute, more than any other form of American recreation and entertainment, what we would call mass entertainments. They cater to all varieties of tastes and to all sorts and gradations of discrimination. A subtle parlor comedy might be pleasing to a very small minority of movie-goers, but the man who works in a steel plant or in the coal mines may laugh himself sick over a custard-pie comedy which the alleged highbrows would reject as being unworthy of being exhibited. We claim that all classes of people are entitled to whatever enjoyment and recreation and benefit they can get out of this great instrument of education and entertainment.

I have failed to notice any widespread clamor for national censorship either of the stage or of the press, and one thing that I have noticed particularly in this hearing is that there has been no evidence submitted to your committee of a universal clamor on the part of the people who see the movies, the 50,000,000 or more who regularly patronize them every week, for Federal regulation of them. They are not represented here as demanding the kind of regulation of this industry that these two measures propose. It may be unfortunate, perhaps, that the great majority of our people might be classed by the highbrows as lowbrows, but we can not improve their culture by statute. We can not legislate either intelligence or a more discriminating taste for pictures by law. That must be a slow constructive process of education and enlightenment; and to the extent that we enlighten and educate and create a desire for better pictures in the minds of our people, to just that extent will the industry react and furnish such pictures.

It seems to me, then, that as far as these two measures are concerned experience has long since demonstrated that we can not by legislative enactment make people more cultured, more pious, or more discriminating in their habits, their preferences and their tastes in a matter such as public entertainment.

About a year ago I had the pleasure of talking to the fifth annual convention of the National Council of Catholic Women, which was held in St. Louis, and I made a statement to the convention, which was given some circulation by the press, to the effect that I thought that governmental paternalism in matters of opinion was a bad thing, and that I urged cooperation rather than repressive legislation as the solution of the motion-picture problem. At that time a

newspaper published in Congresswoman Kahn's home State, the San Jose News are you familiar with it, Mrs. Kahn?

Mrs. KAHN. Yes.

Mr. MCMAHON. That paper made this rather pertinent comment which I should like to see a part of this record.

Referring to my remarks, the editor said:

There is too much repressive legislation already. There is too little effort to work problems out through persuasion of one group by another. If you believe that one group is doing something adverse to public interest, why not use your own group to bring persuasive argument upon that other group? If you do this, instead of at once demanding one more law, difficult to enforce and engendering much animosity on all sides, you may do a constructive public service instead of stirring up additional trouble.

That was the comment of the editor of the San Jose News. Now, while, as I said before, I do not claim at the present time that pictures approach anywhere near perfection, I do not admit that they are as black as they have been painted before this committee. But assuming for the sake of argument that they are ten times worse than they have been painted to you, I should still consider them the lesser evil when compared with this paternalistic attempt to bring about the shifting of parental and individual responsibility in a matter of this kind upon a Federal board of seven persons authorized to act for the 117,000,000 of our population. There have been, as frequently happens in hearings of this kind, the usual expressions of solicitude concerning the children and youth of the country and references to the alleged protection to them which the kind of legislation proposed in these bills would provide.

I wish to call the attention of the members of the committee to perhaps the most vital sentence in the now famous opinion written by Justice McReynolds in determining the appeal of the Oregon school cases—an opinion in which Chief Justice Taft and the other esteemed members of the United States Supreme Court unanimously concurred. The question under consideration was a compulsory attendance law forcing all children to attend the public schools in the State of Oregon. In holding the law unconstitutional, Justice McReynolds expressed the unanimous opinion of the court in these words:

The child is not the mere creature of the State. Those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize him and prepare him for additional obligations.

What Justice McReynolds said in respect to formal education may, I think, apply with equal force to the question of motion pictures. It is the parents who have, and must bear, the great responsibility for what their children should be and for what they should see in the movies.

And yet we find in this bill no appeal to parents and guardians of children to measure up to their responsibility as far as the selection of their motion-picture entertainment is concerned, but rather a provision which would tend to shift the responsibility from the home to the State; that would tend to dull the consciences of those who should exercise the "high duty" of protecting their children; and which would cause the State to exercise a function which is the primary duty as well as the right of the parents and guardians.